How to Run a Skills Gap Analysis

A skills gap analysis compares the skills your people currently have against the skills your roles actually require, and produces a prioritised list of the differences. It answers three questions: what should each role be able to do, what can each person do now, and which of those differences matter enough to act on.

The method below takes six steps and produces a working analysis for a 20–50 person business in roughly a day of effort. Most published guidance on this topic is written for enterprise L&D functions with dedicated analysts; this is the version that works when the person running it also has another job.

The six steps

Step 1: Define the required skills per role, not per person

Start from roles. A skills gap analysis built person-by-person produces a description of your current team rather than a standard to measure against.

For each role, list six to fifteen skills. Draw them from four sources:

Statutory and regulatory requirements — whatever your sector's regulator expects the role to be competent in. HSE's guide to health and safety training sets out deciding what training an organisation needs as the first step, which is the same starting question for any statutory skill on this list.
The tasks the role performs weekly — if it happens weekly and it can go wrong, it belongs on the list
The tasks that only happen occasionally but carry consequence — incident response, an annual audit, a machine changeover
What the role is expected to become — skills needed for where the business is going, not only where it is

Keep the list to what varies between people and matters to the outcome. Fifty skills per role is a document nobody completes.

Step 2: Set the required level for each skill

A gap only exists relative to a standard. Use a small levelled scale — the Skills Matrix Template Generator's 0–5 scale keeps this analysis and any matrix built from it consistent — and set a target per skill per role before assessing anyone.

Level	Meaning
0	Not assessed — no assessment recorded
1	Awareness — understands basics, needs supervision
2	Novice — can perform with guidance
3	Competent — works independently to standard
4	Proficient — handles complex situations, can coach others
5	Expert — sets standards, trains and assesses others

Two rules that save rework later. First, not every skill should target level 5 — most roles need level 3 on most skills, and inflating targets manufactures gaps that do not matter. Second, set some targets to 0 deliberately, meaning "out of scope for this role", and make that convention explicit so a zero is not read as a failure.

Our guide to skills matrix levels covers writing descriptors that two assessors will apply the same way — the single biggest determinant of whether the analysis is trustworthy.

Step 3: Assess current levels against evidence

This is where most analyses lose credibility. Three sources of evidence, in ascending order of reliability:

Self-assessment — fast, useful as a starting point, systematically unreliable at the top of the scale. People who know least about a skill are worst placed to judge their own level in it.
Manager assessment — better, but subject to recency bias and to the manager's own level in that skill.
Observation against a written descriptor — slow, and the only one that produces defensible evidence.

The practical compromise: self-assess everything, then verify by observation anything claimed at level 3 or above, and anything safety-critical at any level. That concentrates the expensive method where the consequences sit.

Record the assessment date and assessor alongside each level. An undated level tells you nothing about whether it is still true.

Step 4: Calculate the gaps

Gap = required level − current level. Positive numbers are gaps; zero or negative means the standard is met.

At this point you have a grid. Read it twice, in two directions, because the two readings surface different problems:

By row (per person) — who is below standard, and on what. This drives individual development plans.
By column (per skill) — how many people hold each skill at level 3+. This drives resilience planning.

The column reading is the one people skip and the one that finds the expensive problems. A skill where exactly one person is at level 3 is a single point of failure even when nobody shows a gap — everyone else may be legitimately targeted at level 1. Our skills matrix examples show this reading worked through on a manufacturing line team.

Step 5: Prioritise — not everything gets fixed

A gap list with thirty entries and no ordering does not get actioned. Rank by three factors, in this order:

Consequence. Does the gap carry a safety, regulatory, or client-contractual consequence? These come first regardless of effort.
Coverage. Is this skill held by fewer than two people at the required level? Single points of failure outrank individual shortfalls.
Effort. Only once the first two are settled. Using effort as the primary sort produces a list of easy, low-value wins.

A common and useful output is three tiers: fix within 30 days (consequence-bearing), fix this quarter (coverage), and monitor (everything else).

Step 6: Convert gaps into a plan with owners and dates

A gap without an owner and a date is a note, not a plan. For each prioritised gap, record: what will close it (course, mentoring, structured on-job practice, recruitment), who owns it, the target date, and how the closure will be evidenced.

That last field matters more than it looks. "Attended training" does not close a competence gap — a reassessment does. Building the reassessment into the plan is what stops the analysis being repeated from scratch next year with the same findings.

Our training plan template guide covers the structure for the resulting plan, and the training needs analysis template guide covers the adjacent exercise of working out what training the gaps actually require.

Skills gap analysis template structure

The template is a grid with a header block. Keep it to one sheet per team.

Header block — team name, analysis date, who ran it, review date.

Grid columns:

Column	Contents
Person	Name and role
Skill (one column per skill)	Current level / required level, e.g. `2/3`
Gap	Auto-calculated: required − current
Priority	H / M / L from Step 5
Action	What closes it
Owner	Who is accountable
Target date	When
Evidence of closure	Reassessment date and outcome

Footer block — a per-skill count of people at required level or above. This is the column reading from Step 4, and putting it in the template means nobody has to remember to do it.

The Skills Matrix Template Generator will produce the grid portion pre-loaded with sector-appropriate skills and a proficiency scale, which removes the blank-page problem.

Skills gap analysis vs training needs analysis

These overlap and are not the same exercise.

A skills gap analysis identifies the difference between current and required capability. Its output is a list of gaps.
A training needs analysis determines what intervention will close a gap. Its output is a list of interventions.

The gap analysis comes first. Running a TNA without one produces training that is bought because it is available rather than because it addresses a measured shortfall. Not every gap is closed by training either — some are closed by recruitment, some by redesigning the task, and some by accepting the gap and documenting why.

What makes an analysis worth repeating

A fixed review cadence. Annual for stable teams, six-monthly where roles or processes change. Diarise it at the point you finish, not later.
Re-use of the standard. The required levels from Step 2 should not be rewritten each cycle. If they are drifting, that is a signal the roles have genuinely changed and worth noticing on its own.
Closure evidence, not closure claims. The value compounds only if last cycle's gaps were verifiably closed. Otherwise you are re-running the same analysis against the same findings.
Connection to the training record. The gap analysis says what competence is required; the training matrix says what training was delivered. Keeping them connected is what lets you show that the training produced the competence, which is the question a regulator or client auditor will actually ask.

For the wider picture of how competency assessment connects to compliance record-keeping, our complete skills matrix guide covers the sector-by-sector requirements, and the competency matrix template guide covers assessing behaviours rather than skills.

TrainProof is being built to keep required levels, current levels, and the training record in one place. Gaps calculate themselves, single points of failure surface automatically, and closure is evidenced by reassessment rather than attendance. It is in development and not yet available.

Join the waitlist to be notified when it is ready.

This guide is for general information only and does not constitute legal or regulatory advice. Skills and competency requirements vary by sector, role, and specific workplace risks. Always verify statutory or regulatory training requirements against current legislation and your sector's regulator for your specific circumstances.